[consumer451]

The sad truth is that we are all easily programmed meat machines, myself included.

The Citizens United decision allowed capital to have a much larger influence on the programming of our political media.

Obama, many faults and all, has a great quote on this topic: ~"If I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either!"

[lotsofpulp]

I don’t subscribe to that. People are inherently racist/sexist/classist. They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.

That is why Trump was right about him shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. He was smart enough to tap into this undercurrent that I was unaware of, perhaps due to my youth.

[consumer451]

> People are inherently racist/sexist/classist.

Yes, we grow into that as we turn into toddlers, then hopefully we grow out of it. One of our simple core algo's is categorization, but it's just a base algo which came out of base survival techniques from the days of yore.

> They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.

This is true to some extent, and very sad. However, it does not apply to everyone in my experience. It only applies to those who see the world as a zero-sum game. If I understand the last few hundred years correctly, thanks to technology, we do not live in a zero-sum world, so it's an obsolete concept. Once you learn that, it overrides those old base algo's, if you are in a social circle that allows this. However, those base categorizations do appeal to our base instincts, so it's an effective political campaigning technique for those politicians who have no shame.

I ain't young no more, and the biggest change in US politics that I have seen is that being shameless has become normalized, again.

There are many examples of when super racist/sexist/political people get to talk with those who they once hated, they drop all those previous trainings, and just see them as fellow humans, and even friends. This is why those who use the obsolete categorization ideology as their entire identity don't want you to go to university, or travel, where you might learn all that.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> People are inherently racist/sexist/classist

this feels like missing the forest for the trees.

racism, sexism, classism etc are structural issues. individual prejudices are fear-based levers that are manipulated by bad actors in order to serve economic goals.

it doesn't appear to be difficult to manipulate people using these levers when you're also responsible for the dogshit economic and social conditions they find themselves in.